Pyaasa

It sits next to A Touch of Zen because both are really asking one question: what is a person's craft worth in its own time. The scholar in A Touch of Zen sells paintings for rice; the poet in Pyaasa writes verses for a living and cannot eat. Both are declared useless by the people closest to them. Calcutta in 1957 and a mountain village in 1970s Taiwan are half a continent apart, and the answer is equally cold. This is also the first Hindi-language musical in the archive. Until now India was represented only by Pather Panchali, a Bengali parallel-cinema film that belongs to an entirely different lineage from the Bombay musical and cannot stand in for it.

加尔各答。Vijay 写乌尔都语诗，题材是失业、贫困与街上的穷人，出版商嫌这些不卖钱，兄弟们嫌他不务正业，最后干脆把他的诗稿当废纸称斤卖掉。他在这座城市里没有位置。直到某天，一个在街上被所有人侧目的女人 Gulabo 告诉他，她背得出他的诗——而他的前女友 Meena，早已为了生活嫁给有钱的出版商 Ghosh。一个写诗的人、一个被贱卖的人、一个被购买的人，三种处境在这座城市里彼此照见。

In 2005 Time magazine placed it on its All-TIME 100 Movies list, the only Hindi-language film included, calling it the soulfully romantic of the lot; in 2011 the same magazine named it one of the top ten romantic movies. Rotten Tomatoes records 100% freshness from eight reviews, averaging 9.00/10. It took four votes in the 2002 Sight & Sound critics' and directors' polls, placing around 160th; it stands 330th on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They aggregate. In 2019 the BFI named it the greatest musical of 1957. Restored by Ultra Media & Entertainment, it screened in the Venice Classics section of the 72nd Venice Film Festival in 2015, the first Indian film to receive such a restoration. One thing should be said plainly: it won almost no major awards at the time, and its international reputation was built in Europe more than two decades later.